David Szalay - All That Man Is

He feels as though he has been slapped.

‘Yeah?’ he says. And then, when that doesn’t seem to express enough disapproval of the suggestion, ‘Really?’

‘What do you want to do?’ It’s as if she is negotiating.

‘I dunno.’ He scratches his head.

In fact, he does know — the knowledge is painfully present to him.

When maybe ten seconds have passed without him saying anything else, she says, ‘I think we should head back.’

He shrugs sadly. ‘Yeah, okay.’

They walk to the underground in silence, and hardly speak on the train.

The parked Merc, its familiar shadows. Gábor says, ‘So I hear you and Emma did some sightseeing today.’ He was still sleeping when they got back from their excursion, and Balázs doesn’t know what Emma has told him about it. That she has told him about it at all is somehow disappointing. Warily, he says, ‘Yeah, uh…’

‘You went to the wax museum,’ Gábor says.

‘Well, yeah. We didn’t go in, though.’ Still unsure what Gábor thinks about it, Balázs’s tone is defensive.

‘No, that’s what she said,’ Gábor says. ‘She said you’d’ve had to queue for two hours or something.’

‘More,’ Balázs says.

‘You can get priority tickets,’ Gábor tells him.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ With his index fingers on the steering wheel, Gábor is staring straight ahead, through the wide windscreen at the long dark Mayfair street. ‘That’s what I did, when I went.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Balázs admits.

‘So what’d you do then?’ Gábor asks. There is something strange about the question — if she has told him about the museum and the queue, then surely Gábor has asked her, and she has told him, what they did next. So why, Balázs wonders uneasily, is he asking him ? Is he suspicious? Is he feeling for discrepancies with Emma’s story?

‘Nothing really,’ Balázs says. ‘Went for a walk. How was…How was last night?’

Gábor doesn’t seem to mind changing the subject. ‘It was excellent,’ he says. ‘You should’ve come.’

‘I was tired,’ Balázs says apologetically.

‘Yeah?’ It’s as if Gábor doesn’t quite believe him.

‘Yeah.’

‘I thought maybe you wanted to make a move on Emma.’ Gábor is smiling when he says this — it might be a joke. ‘Especially when you went off together like that today.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Balázs says.

‘No?’ Gábor is still smiling.

‘No,’ Balázs says. He feels the heat in his face, the way it seems to implicate him.

‘It’s just that most guys around Emma,’ Gábor says, looking at him slyly, ‘they’ve got their fucking tongues hanging out, you know what I mean? You don’t seem that into her.’

‘No,’ Balázs says.

That doesn’t seem enough, though.

The way Gábor had said it — ‘You don’t seem that into her’ — it sounded like something that needed explaining.

‘You’re not gay, are you?’ Gábor says, as if it is something he has been meaning to ask for some time.

Balázs is, for a moment, too surprised to speak. Then he says, ‘No.’

‘It’s not a problem if you are,’ Gábor tells him.

‘No,’ Balázs says. ‘No, I’m not. I, uh. No.’

‘She’s just not your type, or what?’

With an almost pained expression, Balázs says, ‘Look…I dunno…’

‘Hey, whatever, man. I didn’ mean to get personal.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘She’s not your type, she’s not your type,’ Gábor says. ‘Whatever.’

They don’t talk much after that.

A sort of depression, Balázs finds, seems to have engulfed him. It’s like a storm that has threatened all afternoon — in the terrible stillness of the smoky living room — and has now fallen on him in a silent maelstrom of despair. Sitting there in the shadows, he thinks with shame and sadness of his own life, his own things, his own pathetic pleasures.

Gábor’s phone.

It is her, and there is obviously some problem. ‘Okay, just stay there,’ Gábor says. ‘Just stay where you are. We’ll be there in a minute.’

When he has hung up, he says, ‘We’ve got to go up there again. She had to lock herself in the bathroom.’

—

The anonymous opulence of room 425. The TV is on loud. Sitting on the bed, its linen an energetic mess like stiffly whipped egg white, is a man. He is about forty, thinnish, the length of his face exaggerated by the way he is losing his hair. Emma is not there, though her dress, which is all she wears on these occasions, is on the floor. The man’s clothes are on the floor too — he is naked. He stands up with a strange lack of urgency when he hears them come in. ‘Who are you?’ he says.

‘Where is she?’ Gábor asks.

‘There.’ The man indicates a door. Then he says, more fiercely, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Watch him,’ Gábor says to Balázs, and knocks on the door. ‘Hey, it’s me,’ he shouts, and a moment later is let in.

In the well-lit room, Balázs is left standing face to face with the naked man, no more than a metre from him. The man seems unembarrassed by his nakedness. He sniffs loudly and says, ‘I’m not finished with her, okay?’

Balázs says nothing, and probably looks as if he didn’t understand, because the man says, ‘You speak English, you fucking gorilla? I’m not finished. So why don’t you and your friend just get out of here?’

When Balázs still says nothing, the man says, ‘You think I hurt her? I didn’t hurt her,’ he tells Balázs’s impassive face. ‘I just told her she’s a slut, which she is. That’s what I told her, and that’s what she is. Hey, gorilla, you fucking ape! I’m talking to

Whoosh

—

There is a noise like a dog enjoying a knuckle of gristle as the nose breaks and fills with blood.

The man staggers back against the bed, looking confused. There is suddenly a huge amount of blood, all over his mouth.

‘She’s okay…’ Gábor says from the open bathroom door. ‘What the fuck…’

The man is on his knees, with his blood-smeared hands at his face and blood dripping quickly into the deep pile of the carpet.

Balázs is already leaving. Outside in the corridor it is as if he has never been there before. Blinded by adrenalin he is unable to find the service stairs and descends instead in a jewel-box of a lift. The doors open on the lobby, its dull dazzle. The shimmering cloud of a chandelier. The blood on his hand, slippery a minute ago, is now sticky, and his hand is starting to throb. With a single smooth turn, the revolving door exchanges the silent lobby for the noises of the night — the intermittent hiss of traffic from the avenue, the more immediate thrum of a taxi pulling up to the hotel entrance.

Balázs walks. He is in the avenue’s trench of triple-shadowed light. Every few seconds some vehicle overtakes him. He isn’t thinking anything, just feeling the night air on the skin of his face.

Slowly he becomes aware of things — the trees, their leaves a lurid green in the towering lamplight. The darkness on the other side of the avenue that must be some sort of park. Some people waiting at a bus stop.

He stops in front of a ghostly BMW showroom. He wonders what he is going to do. Tremblingly, the situation starting unpleasantly to impinge, he lights a Park Lane. He isn’t even sure what happened. He hit the man — at least once — he knows that. Judging by the throb and soreness in his own hand he hit him hard. Probably he broke his nose. Staring without seeing them at the waxed and frowning BMWs, Balázs tells himself that the man will not want to involve the police. He was wearing a wedding ring, for one thing — Balázs had noticed that. He would have to tell his wife some lie to explain the damage to his face, but he would have had to tell her some lie anyway.